Let No Man Seek To Make It Easy

Carl C. Jung, “The Love Problem of a Student,” in Civilization in Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, vol. 10 of the Collected Works), §§231-2, 111-112:

. . . Love requires depth and loyalty of feeling; without them it is not love but mere caprice. True love will always commit itself and engage in lasting ties; it needs freedom only to effect its choice, not for its accomplishment. Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. If this sacrifice is not made, his illusions prevent the growth of any deep and responsible feeling, so that the very possibility of experiencing real love is denied him.

Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. And because this is so difficult, few mortals can boast of such an achievement. But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights.

Still Ignorant Remain

Saʿdī Shīrāzī, The Gulistān; Or, Rose Garden, tr. Edward B. Eastwick (London: 1880, 2nd edt.), ch. VIII., 206:

        How much soe’er thou learn’st, ’tis all vain;
        Who practise not, still ignorant remain.
        A quadruped, with volumes laden, is
        No whit the wiser or more sage for this:
        How can the witless animal discern,
        If books be piled on it? or wood to burn?

We Were One

Heloise to Abelard, in Abelard and Heloise: The Love Letters, A Poetical Rendering, tr. Ella C. Bennett (San Francisco & New York: Paul Elder and Com., 1907), 1-2:

        My Abelard, my love, my own adored!
        When last I wrote to thee my soul I poured,
        In all its grief and anguish from my heart—
        O Abelard, my love, why did we part?
        Why didst thou hide thyself in gloomy cell,
        And banish me, ’til earth seemed part of Hell?
        And my last letter! O not answered yet!
        I cannot for one single hour forget
        That we were one. At night from dreams I call
        Thy name aloud, in pain, then like a pall,
        The ceiling of my cell o’ercaps my view,—
        And visions fade again that brought me you!

        Think you at night when at my prayers I kneel,
        That only thoughts celestial through me steal?
        Think you the sound of orisons divine
        Can banish that lost bliss—that you were mine?
        That once you loved me, we together slept,
        Together laughed and loved, together wept;
        Together shared each joy, each pain, each thought? [...]